Skip to main content

"Thrice Ripened" - Lord of Blights (adding colour)

Masters of the corpse orchards, 
the Lords of Blights are responsible for creating 
the blessed death’s heads. 
These projectiles are doled out to their Rotbringers, 
and hurled at the foe 
to spread the plagues festering within.

- Games Workshop


Welcome back to your weekly respite here on The Art of Caesura!

Today we are going to continue our look at a very special model. It is of the Lord of Blights that I painted at Marco Frisoni's workshop a few weeks ago. And I have to say, I think I really levelled-up painting this guy!


If you're just joining us, I attended my first painting course recently, which you can read about here

Last week I showed you the first stage of painting this guy - the value sketch. So today we'll look at adding the haunting and toxic colours. 


Once I had my value sketch in place (see last week), it was time to start adding colour. Before working on the OSL effect, I blocked in the "local" colours; these are the colours that would actually exist on him regardless of lighting. The important part of this was that the colours be translucent so as to allow the value sketch to influence their lightness and darkness. So I painted his armour a desaturated teal, his skin a necrotic pink-grey, his leather bands and gallows with thinned Contrast Wyldwood, and his rags a thinned warm brown.


Knowing that I wanted him to be lit by the toxic green glow of the swamp from beneath, I then launched into this eerie tone. I used Contrast Plaguebearer Flesh for the more subtle green areas (on his upper body) and mixed in this guy:


...for some real pop!


By the end of the two-day workshop that's as far as I had gotten (the two pictures above) and immediately above you can see my palette from the second day alone. 

But I came away bursting with enthusiasm to keep working on him, so when I got home I continued to push the contrast - highlighting smaller and smaller areas to be brighter and brighter and the shadows to be deeper and deeper, all the while trying to not totally obliterate the local colours but still selling the environmental effects. 


This style was unlike anything I had ever painted before. Having two such diverse light sources was actually a great deal of fun to emulate. All downward-facing surfaces should look green and everything from above his circumference (the bulge of his belly) should be a paler lavender colour. The maggots were particularly fun as some of them are green on one side and lavender on the other.


I started working on the metallic aspects trying to control the light and shadow by controlling lustre. Marco pointed out that metal in shadow doesn't look reflective at all, and yet we paint all of our metal bits with metallic paints. So he recommends that when shading metallics, you actually colour-match with a standard (non-metallic) paint and glaze this on in the shadows. To highlight the metals, it is important to add in the environmental colours to your metallic paints (green and lavender for me) to really sell the effect. 

You can see this in action on the metal rim of his shield and the faces of his hammer. The upward facing surfaces of the hammer are tinted lavender while the downward facing surfaces are green-tinted. 

Like all other highlights and shadows on the model these need continuous refining to maximize value contrast to pure silver (white for non-metallic areas) at the lightest points. 



At this point I was happy with the direction that the painting was going, but the quick stand-in base that I had whipped up was detracting from my ability to know how bright to go with the highlights, so I decided to get to work on the base. 


I clipped some small roots out of a dirt mound on our property; I have learned that real roots actually look more in scale as trees than real branches do. 


I then quickly painted the whole thing black before trying my hand at one of my first ever attempts at air-brushing (using the cheap crappy (but perfectly serviceable for my purposes) one you can get off Wish). I sprayed the areas of the swamp that would be toxic green, first with white then yellow then that fluorescent green. 




I made sure to spray the upper surfaces of the "tree" with the white - as I would be tinting these lavender for the moonlight. I also controlled some overspray onto the base of the tree to show the toxic swamp illuminating it too. 


NOW WE'RE COOKIN' WITH GAS!!


I re-attached him to his base and added some gloops of gloss varnish mixed with the fluorescent green for toxic puddles. With all of this in place, it was easier to see where to go brighter with the highlights. 


And here he is: the completed Lord of Blights!!


Thank you for joining me through this process. Next week we'll reward ourselves with a nice long self-indulgent look at this finished guy under cool moody lighting!


Reading: Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson
Watching: Space Force - Season 2


Next Week:

Feelin' plaguey...

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Full Stop - Trench Crusade

The skies shall darken, the ground shall open up and the screams of the damned shall echo through the ages. - Novae Revelationes 99:24, Trench Crusade Greetings friends of the Caesura, and welcome back to your Friday dose of The Art of Caesura! I hope you are well, and I'm sending loads of positive vibes your way, especially if you need them today (and you will after reading of the awesome Grimdark horrors ahead).   Last week we left off looking at my plans and aspirations for Hive Fleet Klendathu, and today I had planned to show you the test model that I have painted for this Starship Troopers-inspired Tyranid force. However, something cool is afoot, and it's kind of time-sensitive... That's right - there's a Kickstarter (which has now raised over 2 million dollars!) for a very Grimdark miniatures skirmish game and it is due to end on Tuesday, so I decided to reschedule things on the blog a little to draw your attention to this before you miss your chance.  I am talki...

The Full Stop - A Deep Dive into Warhammer 40k Combat Patrol

Welcome to Combat Patrol!  Whether you are a new recruit to Warhammer 40,000  or a seasoned veteran,  Combat Patrol is all about getting your forces  into action as quickly as possible. - Combat Patrol Rules - Games Workshop Welcome back to the Art of Caesura! Recent readers will see that we've been looking at our fun little Warhammer gathering, KillCon over the past few weeks. Two weeks ago I provided a narrative verion of my game of Combat Patrol of my Black Templars vs. Tristan's Tyranids where as l ast week I gave a more "gamer oriented" play-by-play of the game.  Today I want to dive deeper into this accessible and engaging game-type. I want to argue that Combat Patrol is not just for beginners. Combat Patrol in 10th Edition is Games Workshop's new smallest scale Warhammer 40k game type. But unlike in previous editions, where it just meant that both sides took 500 point armies and went at it, in this edition, Games Workshop has changed things up a litt...

"Recitation of Faith" - Terminator Chaplain Conversion - Part 1

Chaplains rouse Space Marines to war  with their litanies of faith,  and never is this spiritual fortification more vital  than amidst the blood and horror of boarding actions  and beachhead strikes. - Games Workshop Hello all! Welcome to your weekly dose of The Art of Caesura! As usual, I'm sending you lots of positive vibes, especially if you need them today. After almost half a year of Hellboy content on the blog, it's time to return to my beloved Black Templars. I have actually been working away in the background over the past few months, polishing off a few high-profile projects for my Templars. The first of which I will begin to reveal today! Today is the first part of a kit-bash that I'm pretty proud of. We're going to be looking at it in detail over the next few weeks and today we'll look at the build.  For those unfamiliar with Black Templars, they are inspired by crusading knights and are really not fans of psychic folks (the whole "burn the witch...